Went to the Thursday Morning WW meeting and was happy to see I am down another .6 pounds. Slow progress is progress! The receptionist (I love her) said "you are really close to goal now." I am. I am still operating under the assumption that It's Gonna Be May :)Yesterday I went for a consult with a nutritionist. I saw her speak at an event a few years ago - what she said back then was quite compelling and I actually changed some of my eating habits as a result. For example, she was an advocate of eating more fat, such as sautéing veggies and eggs in real butter, use full-fat dairy, etc. And in general, eat whole, real food. These were easy changes for me to make. Higher fat is NOT Weight Watchers friendly... so that is probably around the time I started tracking calories rather than points.
In any case, over the past decade, I have made quite a few changes to how I eat. It has been a long process but the result today is there is less sugar, less alcohol, less pizza, less processed food, more fat, more vegetables, more whole (real) foods in my daily diet. My 27 year old self would never believe that I eat the way I do, and that *I like it* - liking it is the key!
So at this point in my journey, I felt ready to talk to this woman one-on-one about what I'm eating and when I should be eating it, based on my goal to lose fat and properly support my activity levels. I gave her a week's worth of food and workout logs, including the day our friends moved and my lunch was wine and doughnuts. I gave her my most recent lab results. And we met to discuss it all yesterday.
Her conclusion is that I'm making good food choices overall. Yay, me! I knew this, but it's nice to hear someone else recognize it. Her whole premise is to get the body to be trained to use fat as fuel. She gave me a lot of info about how the body works and how it best burns fat. And then she gave me some guidelines to get this going in my body. This involves more of a focus on macronutrients, or macros - carbs, fat and protein. Her goal for me is to for my calories to be made up of 30% carbs, 50% fat and 20% protein. I am currently right on with the protein, but she wants me to shift some of my carb calories to fat calories. She gave me a lot of great ideas, the ones that stand out were:
- Use a whole tbsp. of butter or olive oil at a time
- Up the veggies. Have three vegetables with breakfast, if you can.
- Breakfast should be 2 eggs, not just one.
- Use spiral veggie noodles instead of pasta.
- Add cheese and avocados to salads
- For snacks, you want the same amount of fat and carbs, grams wise. (I think that was it).
- Nuts are great snacks. Beef jerky is, too, as long as the sugar content is on the low side.
- Cauliflower pizza
- Use almond meal or flax seeds instead of bread crumbs
- Recipes for coco seedy bread, a nut/seed mix as a substitute for granola, some coconut bars that are high-fat
- Carb intake should come from veggies and fruits, generally. Sweet potatoes, potatoes and winter squashes are starchy veggies and good carb sources.
Some of those things I know, I just don't do, others are a surprise.
She also wants me to try to eat 1500 calories a day right now and not worry about the workout calories. OK. This makes me nervous... but OK, I will try it.
My overall impression was that these are changes I can definitely live with. And perhaps these are expensive changes... but then, being in a healthy body is truly priceless. I have to actively plan my meals and be a little bit obsessed with tracking for a while until I get the hang of it. I will be learning about macros, I have never concentrated on them before. I am pretty excited to see what happens, here. Oh, and I'm still doing chips and margaritas on Cinco de Mayo. Because, well, life. :)
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